The Samarya Center and Why It Rocks

When I'm in my Samarya teaching groove (as opposed to my hot yoga teaching groove), I have a hard time verbalizing my frame of mind, but I think of it vaguely as being less rigid and more loosy-goosy. I love hot yoga, but us high-achieving perfectionistic types, we like our hard-and-fast rules of alignment and this is RIGHT and this is WRONG. Hot yoga plays right into this. For my particular set of thought patterns, the attention to alignment in hot yoga (especially the endless working toward an "ideal") tends to strengthen threads of my personality that do not need to be strengthened---themes that at best hinder my growth and at worst are downright self-destructive. That sounds a bit dramatic, now that I've written it out. It's not all that terrible, just a gradual effect I've noticed over time, especially when contrasted with the way I think while under the influence of Samarya.

Samarya Center's core teaching is:

The student is perfect and whole exactly as they are.

For example, you do not "fix" the student, and you do not "correct" their pose, although of course you might make an adjustment if it looks they're persisting in doing something that's causing pain or could cause injury. But for the most parts, adjustments at Samarya are AAAAH!-djustments. They are meant to feel good.

While in the Samarya community (note: Samarya is Sanskrit for community!) I've heard alignment questions frequently answered with something along the lines of: "I don't know, how does it feel when you do the pose that way?" At first, this really threw me. (NOTE: I only went to two classes at Samarya before going to teacher training. I could smell what they were cooking, and it is good.) Confronted with this new approach to alignment, my black-and-white rule-loving side was freaking out and floundering for the side of the pool, sputtering "but but but I need to know when I'm wrong so I can properly engage in silent, violent fits of self-criticism and blame at the appropriate times!" After the first several days of Samarya training, naturally I started looking at this and questioning the validity of said fits...

Cut to about six weeks after the Samarya training intensive, back in Fort Lauderdale for my annual two-day visit with Jimmy Barkan. Now I love Jimmy, but in the middle of a class full of trainees, we're in Standing Bow (which is similar to Dancer) and he breaks class to ask, "OK, what's wrong with Lindsay?" And I almost had to clap a hand over my mouth not to blurt out, "Nothing! She's perfect and whole exactly as she is!" Of course what he's going for is what could be "better" about her "alignment," and he has a huge heart, and absolutely wants nothing but the best for this woman and all his teacher trainees, but Samarya has made me more sensitive to what, for lack of a better term, we called "languaging" in training.

In case you're wondering why I'm getting up early and observing and assisting all these classes: Getting the 200-hr YA-approved training in at Samarya means I can loosen or cut ties with my hot yoga mothership, and that's OK for several reasons, chief among them that my heart doesn't really lie in figuring out what's "wrong" with a yoga practitioner's pose.

I'm not going to turn my back completely on hot yoga, though. Still love it. I've been trying to teach more original-sequence and/or Vinyasa classes lately, and inwardly belly-aching that I'm still mostly teaching hot, which is the same sequence every class. And that can get boring. But I recently had the thought: I don't teach yoga just for my personal fulfillment or to keep my mind challenged and occupied. I serve others. It was basically my whole motivation for going after this vocation in the first place. If doing that means teaching more hot yoga for now, I'll take it! And from the limited feedback I've been getting, many students are receiving some benefit in my classes, so who am I to quibble with that?